The TARDIS
The TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space) is a time machine and spacecraft in the British science fiction television program Doctor Who and its associated spin-offs.
A TARDIS is a product of the advanced technology of the Time Lords, an extraterrestrial civilization to which the program's central character, the Doctor, belongs. A properly maintained and piloted TARDIS can transport its occupants to any point in time and any place in the universe. The interior of a TARDIS is much larger than its exterior, which can blend in with its surroundings using the ship's "chameleon circuit". TARDIS’s also possess a degree of sentience (which has been expressed in a variety of ways ranging from implied machine personality and free will through to the use of a conversant avatar) and provide their users with additional tools and abilities including a telepathically-based universal translation system.
In the series, the Doctor pilots an apparently unreliable, obsolete TT Type 40, Mark 3 TARDIS. Its chameleon circuit is faulty, leaving it stuck in the shape of a 1960s-style London police box after a visit to London in 1963. The Doctor's TARDIS was for most of the series’ history said to have been stolen from the Time Lords' home planet, Gallifrey, where it was old, decommissioned and derelict (and, in fact, in a museum). However, during the events of "The Doctor's Wife" (2011), the ship's consciousness briefly inhabits a human body, and she reveals that far from being stolen, she left of her own free will. During this episode, she flirtatiously implies that she "stole" the Doctor rather than the other way around, although she does also refer to him as her "thief" in the same episode.
The unpredictability of the TARDIS's short-range guidance (relative to the size of the Universe) has often been a plot point in the Doctor's travels. Also in "The Doctor's Wife", the TARDIS reveals that much of this "unpredictability" was actually intentional on her part in order to get the Doctor "where [he] needed to go" as opposed to where he "wanted to go".
Although "TARDIS" is a type of craft rather than a specific one, the Doctor's TARDIS is usually referred to as "the" TARDIS or, in some of the earlier serials, just as "the ship", "the blue box", "the capsule" or the police box." The eleventh incarnation of the Doctor is also known to have referred to her as "Sexy," a name she actually adopts as her preferred address in "The Doctor's Wife," much to the Doctor's embarrassment.
Doctor Who has become so much a part of British popular culture that not only has the shape of the police box become more immediately associated with the TARDIS than with its real-world inspiration, the term "TARDIS-like" has been used to describe anything that seems to be bigger on the inside than on the outside. The name TARDIS is a registered trademark of the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Exterior
A TARDIS prop being dismantled in London in 2006.
Although a TARDIS is supposed to blend inconspicuously into whatever environment it turns up in, the Doctor's TARDIS retains the shape of a police box because of a systems fault which occurred in the first Doctor Who episode, "An Unearthly Child," when the TARDIS landed in London in 1963. The ability to alter its appearance was first mentioned in the second episode of the series, where the First Doctor and Susan noted the unit was malfunctioning. ("It's still a police box! Why hasn't it changed?") It was first given a general term of a "camouflage unit" in The Time Meddler (1965). The name "chameleon circuit" was first used in the 1975 Target Books novelization of "The Terror of the Autons," and eventually mentioned on screen in Logopolis (1981). The circuit was called a "cloaking device" by the Eighth Doctor in the Doctor Who television movie, and again a "chameleon circuit" in the 2005 series episode "Boom Town".
The Doctor attempts to repair the circuit in Logopolis and Attack of the Cybermen, but the successful transformation of the TARDIS into the shapes of a pipe organ, a painted Welsh dresser (much to the amusement of Perpurgilliam "Peri" Brown and the Sixth Doctor's annoyance) and an elaborate gateway in the latter serial was followed by a return to the police box shape. The circuit was also repaired during the Virgin New Adventures novels, but again the TARDIS's shape was eventually set back to a police box shape. In "Boom Town" (2005), the Ninth Doctor implied that he had stopped trying to fix the circuit quite some time ago because he had become rather fond of the police box shape – a claim the Eighth Doctor made in the 1996 television movie.
Cosmetically, the police box exterior of the TARDIS has remained virtually unchanged, although there have been slight modifications over the years. For example, the sign on the door concealing the police telephone has been black letters on a white background ("An Unearthly Child"), white on blue ("The Seeds of Death") and white on black ("The Curse of Peladon"). Other modifications include different wordings on the phone panel; for example, "Urgent Calls" ("An Unearthly Child") as opposed to "All Calls" (Castrovalva publicity photos). The "POLICE BOX" sign was wider from Season 18 (1980) onwards and for the 2005 series, but not for the television movie. From An Unearthly Child (1963) to The War Machines" (1966), the TARDIS also had a St. John Ambulance badge on the main doors, as did real police boxes;[20] this has been reinstated and the window frame color has returned to white for Matt Smith's first season as the Doctor, shown in 2010. As the TARDIS does not have a second set of inner doors in the revived series, the interior side of the police box doors – complete with the police telephone mounted on the inside of the cupboard door – are seen from the control room. "The Empty Child" revealed that the cupboard could be opened and the telephone accessed from the exterior, but that this device is non-functional because it is not connected to any telephone lines.[21] In the 1996 television movie, the Eighth Doctor revealed that he hid a secret key in a cubbyhole above the 'P' in the 'POLICE BOX' sign.
Despite the anachronistic police box shape, the TARDIS's presence is rarely questioned when it materializes in the present-day United Kingdom. In "Boom Town", the Doctor simply noted that humans do not notice odd things like the TARDIS, echoing a similar sentiment expressed by the Seventh Doctor in Remembrance of the Daleks (1988), that humans have an "amazing capacity for self-deception". Various episodes, notably "The Sound of Drums", also note that the TARDIS generates a perception filter to reinforce the idea that it is perfectly ordinary.
Doors and lock
For most of the series run, the exterior doors of the police box operated separately from the heavier interior doors, although sometimes the two sets could open simultaneously to allow the ship's passengers to look directly outside and vice versa. The revived series' TARDIS features no such secondary doors; the police box doors open directly into the console room. The entrance to the TARDIS is capable of being locked and unlocked from the outside with a key, which the Doctor keeps on his person and occasionally gives copies of to his companions. In the 1996 television movie, the Eighth Doctor (and the Seventh before him) kept a spare key "in a cubbyhole behind the 'P'" (of the POLICE BOX sign). In The Invasion of Time, a Citadel Guard on Gallifrey is initially baffled by the archaic lock when attempting to open the Doctor's TARDIS. Newer TARDIS models apparently have more advanced locking mechanisms that are touch-sensitive or may be operated by remote control. In "The Doctor's Wife," the TARDIS implies that she deliberately unlocked herself so the Doctor could steal her.
The Doctor almost always opens the doors inwards, despite the fact that real police boxes open outwards; in "The Doctor's Wife", it is revealed the TARDIS is aware of this and finds it annoying. After crash-landing on its back in Amelia Pond's garden in "The Eleventh Hour", the doors uncharacteristically open outward, as they had previously done when the TARDIS was also on its back in The Ice Warriors; additionally, the left door opened in tandem with the usual right door in these instances. When hovering against a building in the same 'doors-up' horizontal orientation in "Day of the Moon", however, the doors opened inward as usual to receive River Song.
In the 2005 series, the keys are also remotely linked to the TARDIS, capable of signaling its presence or impending arrival by heating up and glowing. The TARDIS keys have varied in design from an ordinary Yale key to an ankh-like key embossed with an alien pattern (identified in Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke's 1972 book The Making of Doctor Who as the constellation of Kasterborous, Gallifrey's home system) from seasons 11 to 13, after which it reverted to the Yale key design. The ankh-like key was also used in the 1996 television movie. In Ghost Light and Survival, a different design, featuring the Seal of Rassilon, was used. The revived series uses the Yale key version, most notably shown in "Blink" (2007), when the Weeping Angels attempt to gain access to the TARDIS using a stolen key.
The key is also able to repair temporal anomalies and paradoxes, including death aversion through its link to the TARDIS.
The TARDIS lock's security level has varied from story to story. Originally, it was said to have 21 different "combinations" and would melt if the key was placed in the wrong one (The Daleks, 1963). The First Doctor was also able to unlock it with his ring (The Web Planet, 1965) and repair it by using the light of an alien sun refracted through the ring's jewel (The Daleks' Master Plan). In "Utopia" (2007) and The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964), the TARDIS was shown to have an internal deadlock; once thrown, it would prevent entry even for authorised users with authorized keys. In The Dalek Invasion of Earth, this was known as 'double-locking'. In The Sensorites (1964), the entire lock mechanism was removed from the TARDIS door via a hand-held Sensorite device.
The lock itself has been shown with different capabilities. In Spearhead from Space (1970), the Third Doctor said that the lock had a metabolism detector, so that even if an unauthorized person had a key, the doors would remain locked. This security measure was also seen in the New Series Adventures novel Only Human by Gareth Roberts, which called it an "advanced meson recognition system." The Ninth Doctor claimed that when the doors were shut, even "the assembled hordes of Genghis Khan" could not enter ("believe me, they've tried") ("Rose"). In "Doomsday", when the TARDIS is confiscated, the Doctor claims, "You'll never get inside it." Several people have managed to just wander into the TARDIS without any problem over the years, including some who became companions; since the TARDIS uses keys, it could easily have been left unlocked. Despite the TARDIS's apparent infallibility in its security, some of the instruments inside or the interior itself have been breached and remote-controlled. In the serial The War Games, the Time Lords manage to breach the inside of the TARDIS while in mid-flight and landing in order to erect something similar to a force field. In "Utopia", the Doctor was able to lock the TARDIS to the coordinates it had previously visited from outside using the sonic screwdriver.
In the 2008 episode "Forest of the Dead", River Song (a character whose timeline intersects with the Doctor in reverse order) says to the Doctor that she knows he would be able to open the TARDIS doors with a snap of his fingers. Although the Doctor dismisses this as impossible, at the conclusion of the episode, he opens and closes the doors by doing just that, eschewing the need for a key. The Eleventh Doctor also does this at the end of "The Eleventh Hour", when revealing the newly regenerated TARDIS interior to Amy Pond; he then does it again in "Day of the Moon". In the 2011 episode, "The Doctor's Wife", he tries to open it by snapping his fingers, but the door is locked by the mysterious entity, House. This ability seems to be unique to the Doctor, though, as he said Time Lords cannot do that.
In the Christmas 2009 episode "The End of Time", Part One, the Doctor uses a remote locking system to lock the TARDIS, similar to the remote-control locking system used on modern cars. Upon pointing his key fob at the TARDIS, the TARDIS makes a distinctive chirp and the light on top of the TARDIS flashes. Later in the same episode, the key fob, when again used by the Doctor, shifts the TARDIS "just a second out of sync" (one second into the future), rendering it invisible and so hiding it from the Master.
The doors are supposed to be closed while materializing; in Planet of Giants (1964), the opening of the doors during a materialization sequence caused the ship and its occupants to shrink to doll size. In The Enemy of the World (1967), taking off while the doors were still open resulted in rapid decompression, with the villainous Salamander being sucked out of the TARDIS. The Second Doctor and his companions managed to cling to the console, and the crisis passed when Jamie McCrimmon managed to shut the doors. In Warriors' Gate (1981), the doors open during flight between two universes, admitting a Tharil named Biroc, and allowing the time winds to burn the Doctor's hand and seriously damage K-9. In "The Runaway Bride" (December 2006), "The Stolen Earth" (2008), "The Beast Below (2010)", and "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship (2012)", however, the doors can be opened safely while the ship is in vacuum, as the TARDIS protects its occupants.
There is evidence that objects clinging to the outside of the TARDIS may be carried with it as it dematerializes. In Silver Nemesis (1988), an arrow is fired at the TARDIS and is embedded in its door. The arrow remains in the door throughout the serial and through several dematerializations’ before being removed at the story's conclusion; this is repeated in "The Shakespeare Code" (2007), and the arrow is removed in the following episode, "Gridlock. "Utopia" presented, for the first time on-screen, a circumstance in which a character travels on the exterior of the TARDIS during a flight, when Jack Harkness was somehow able to grab hold of the TARDIS as it began to dematerialize and hold on to its destination; the episode does establish, however, that a normal person would not have survived the trip, as Harkness is "killed" by the experience, but due to his immortality, soon revives. In "Vincent and the Doctor" (2010), some advertisements are attached to the TARDIS. After materialization, they are shown to be burning.
In the Seventh Doctor audio drama "Colditz", a character was killed by being halfway inside the TARDIS when it dematerialized.
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